Business travel

Boeing's 787

The Dreamliner is grounded

IT may only be mid-January, but Boeing, which makes the increasingly troubled 787 Dreamliner, is having a nightmare of a year. A series of fires aboard the new planes led first to a government review of its safety and then, last Wednesday, to a full grounding from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). When you are introducing a new product—especially one that required billions of dollars of investment to design and manufacture—it is never good for the government to launch an investigation into whether your product is safe.

The grounding goes to show that earlier suggestions (which I discussed here) that a government probe into the Dreamliner might somehow be good for Boeing were rather off-base. As my colleagues at our sister blog Schumpeter noted last Tuesday, there's a chance that the Dreamliner investigation might lead to stricter pre-certification tests and reviews for new planes. That could be bad for other planemakers besides Boeing. But this is undoubtedly Boeing's problem, and the company is taking it on the chin. Boeing's stock is down by more than 2.5% since the beginning of the year, and the company has shed nearly $1.5 billion in market capital.

The good news, if there is any, is that Boeing believes it is close to having an answer to why its planes keep catching on fire. One theory is that the lithium-ion batteries are becoming overcharged, which is causing overheating. But to get out from under the FAA's grounding order, Boeing doesn't just have to find what the problem is. It also has to prove that it has found a solution that will prevent the problem from recurring. America has gone nearly four years without a single death in an airline crash. The FAA doesn't want to risk seeing that change, so it's being hard on Boeing—and rightly so.

The P-51 did not change the outcome of the war. The outcome was determined when the United States entered the war.

Comparing a WWII fighter to a modern commercial aircraft is ridiculous. It's easy to sit in your armchair in your old-age home and say how much better engineers of "the greatest generation" were compared to those of today, but it's inaccurate and irrelevant.

In 1940, the US Department of Defense called for a new top secret air superiority fighter that would outcless anything in the world.
The engineers set to work with slide rules, protractors, and hand drawings.
Painstaking manual wind tunnel testing tweaked the wings and fuselage.
Everything done by hand.
They built a working prototype in just over 100 days despite top secret security, war shortages, and a too small budget.
This plane went on to simultaneous flight testing and mass production because of the emergency of war.
It was a huge gamble.
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And it paid off due to brilliant engineering and timeless design and wonderful state of the art innovation.
The fighter went on to master the sky, kill enemy fighters by a ratio of over 10 to 1, had unrivaled air range, began critical attacks on enemy supply lines and air bases, and surprised Germans who were confused that enemy fighters could reach Berlin.
It was the best fighter of the war.
And it change the outcome of WWII.
It was the North American P-51 Mustangs.
And 70 years later, the plane still flies.
Remarkably agile, fast and modern.
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By comparison the 787 had a 7 year gestation with the world's biggest super computers, smartest engineers, CAD design programs, unlimited budget, world global supply lines, nano technology,the Russian supply of titanium, state of the art logistics, and most advanced wind tunnels.
=> And even then, engineers needed 4 more years of delays because of engineering problems.
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The Mustang was designed and built in only 3 months.
Within 2 years, thousands were built and deployed.
With just the delay of 4 years for the 787,
=> 10 generations of hand drawn, hand calculated, hand built top secret 1940 Mustang Fighter Generations could have been introduced.
And each would have been a classic of design.
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The greatest engineering accomplishments may be behind us.
We stumble with supercomputers, delays, cost overruns, and incompetence.
But the excuse-making factory will be working 24/7 double shifts.
Yes, it is time to fire incompetent, complacent, dysfunctional Boeing workers, designers and engineers.
And get real engineers on board.

Somewhere along the line Boeing lost it's common sense. Very un-Boeing like-- all the nonsense with the tanker contracts with the DOD, moving corporate headquarters to Chicago, and now building a revolutionary composite plane while at the very same moment trying to revolutionize the way a plane was built. Horrible judgement to try so much at once. The new construction methods didn't even make sense to anyone with 'keep it simple, stupid' building experience. Just to save a few bucks on cheaper labor they quadrupled the complexity of construction without any sense that they were also increasing problems and labor costs by a factor of ten. It's a wonder it was only three years behind schedule and it will be a wonder if there aren't more problems to come.

This reminds me of the observation Toyota engineers made when observing GM introducing the Saturn. Toyota considers 3 elements critical to a building a successful product: excellent design, a skilled workforce and a plant with the bugs worked out. When making a change, only one element should be modified at one time. To build a new product with too many leading edge technologies, with a new workforce, in new plants spread all over the world. The wonder isn't that there have been problems; the wonder is that one ever got off the ground.

While this is correct, it is worth noting that there was another airliner grounding in 2003: Concorde, which of course were never flown by US operators and hence were never subject to FAA jurisdiction.

Yeah, comparing the 787 to aircraft built during WW2 is just wrong. Modern aircraft are infinitely more complicated and the design process infinitely more rigorous. For example they would have used maybe 20 loadcases when designing the P-51. A modern commercial jet will be analyzed against about a thousand. Never mind how much more complicated modern avionics are than what the P-51 had.

And I can't speak for the P-51, but I know the B-29 killed Boeing's best test pilots during development. The 787, for all it's faults, hasn't killed anything flesh and blood. Although Boeing's handled of it has killed their credibility.

Boeing didn't just jump into composites all at once with the 787. They put composites into selected places on the 777 first, to gain experience with them. The only serious problem the 787 has right now is with the lithium batteries. Perhaps they didn't adequately test them in other aircraft before committing to their use in the 787. If so, that could fairly be called bad judgement, but it doesn't mean that the whole company is broken as you suggest.

"Pardon me, but the outcome of WWII was determined when the Russians held Stalingrad. "
True, but Stalingrad could not have been held without all the American Trucks that were shipped across the Pacific and through the Siberian Railroad (US Pacific convoys to Soviet Union raised Soviet flags and were inviolate because of Japan-Soviet neutrality pact).

The FAA had absolutely no choice but to ground the 787. In no way was this an overreaction. For a start the FAA was not the first to ground the 787, secondly Boeing had two battery fires in two weeks. The majority of 787's essential flight control systems are electrical, so a battery fire is an extremely serious event. The 787 is a long haul aircraft, and may be up to three hours from the nearest suitable airport in the case of an emergency.
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A certification "waiver" was specifically issued regarding the Lithium Ion battery pack, but with certain conditions, things like, in layman's terms never catching fire, spewing hot gases or spilling electrolyte all over the other electronics, all of which seem to have happened, twice in two weeks.
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The good news for Boeig is that two fires in two weeks points to a significant fault which it ought to be possible to find and fix. The bad news for Boeing is that whilst they may find and fix a fault, the spotlight has now been shifted onto Lithium Ion battery technology itself. If the FAA requires a Lithium Ion battery that can never catch fire, then a battery redesign may be required, which would make it difficult to get the 787 recertified quickly.
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How can something as simple as a battery be so hard to fix? This reminds me of the production problems Airbus had with the A380. People were asking how something so simple as wiring cause such a headache. Well, it turned out wiring an aircraft is not so simple. Battery technology is not simple either. On the ground, Apple and Sony have had costly battery problems. You can take it that battery technology in an aircraft is an order of magnitude more complex. All the other issues (fuel leaks, cracked window), can safely be called "teething". This battery issue, though, looks a lot nastier.
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I have no time for the experts popping up saying "I told you so" about lithium batteries, or complaining about Boeing's outsourcing, or second guessing Boeing's management and marketing strategy. What they did was ambitious and risky, and until now, it looked like the risks have paid off, despite the delays. Indeed, Boeing are unlikely to lose any sales because of this, there is no alternative to the 787. Boeing has over 800 orders for this aircraft, so the company will be fine. The A350 won't ship before 2015, and its queue is 500 orders long. The biggest losers in this affair, are the airlines who cannot fly their aircraft.

The problem requires Boeing to prove that something will not happen which is much more difficult that demonstrating that something will happen. It must do that against an increasingly bureaucratic and risk adverse regulatory environment. I think that those who see a 30 day return to service are perhaps overoptimistic. There is no upside for the politicians involved.

It also raises the very ugly question - Is there a cultural problem at Boeing. I certainly hope not and have great affection for the company. However, their recent past includes criminal activities by top management with respect to the Air Force Tanker Program and highly unprofessional if not illegal gathering of confidential information regaring competitors technology with respect to missle programs. Our nation continues to suffer as we rely on tankers from the dawn of the jet age.

Others have mentioned the DC-10 cargo door problem. It was a far simpler problem in the the last line of defense was the indicator which showed if the locks were properly engaged. However, the design showed only that they actuator had moved not that the locks were engaged. The potential problems with the Boeing electrical system are far more complex.

The 787 is a technological marvel, and a lot of advanced science and engineering has gone into producing the plane, so it’s very upsetting to hear of the recent problems with the plane. To be fair to Boeing, one should look historically at the releases of the other big jetliners. The 747 and 777 had their share of problems when released, and today, they are widely used airliners, and have been very profitable for both Boeing and airline companies[1]. So what’s the problem with the 787? Investigators are placing the blame on the lithium-ion batteries used in the plane, but I think the problem has to do with globalization and the recent and rapid societal shift towards outsourcing.
When the 747 was produced in 1960s, only 20% of the parts were outsourced. The 787s being produced today have up to 80% of their parts outsourced[2]. That large shift tells the story of how fast outsourcing has expanded in recent history. Companies are now able to offshore production, cut costs, and make more profit. If someone in Asia is willing to do it for less money, what's the incentive to keep production domestically? That's the attitude that many companies have taken in recent history, and there's reasonable evidence that it has worked to some degree. Car manufacturers have outsourced many of their parts to Asia and made large profits. Apple has outsourced almost all of its production to China and it’s now the highest valued company in the world. That raises the question, if you can outsource a car or a phone, can you also outsource the production of a jetliner. Should you outsource the production of a jetliner? Boeing’s answer was yes. The recent problems with the 787 indicate that that was the wrong call. The lithium-ion batteries that have been deemed the source of the problem have been found to have come from a Japanese company that’s currently being investigated[3].
While I hope that Boeing will recover, and get the 787s back in the air safely, there are some interesting lessons that can be drawn from the whole ordeal. The 787 was built with the assumption that technology is portable, and that it can be easily transplanted to the producer(s) with the lowest cost. Unfortunately, advanced technologies are not easily portable and high tech standards are not always easily translated or understood. Apple, the world's most valuable company, is learning this lesson as they recently stated that they will start producing Macs in the United States next year[4].
The 787 has been on a long road, and it is currently at an intersection between the recent societal phenomenon of outsourcing, and the advanced technologies that are behind the plane. It will be interesting to see what lies ahead, but as an aviation geek, I can only hope that the recent problems will be a mere speed bump on that road.
-BO
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/business/boeing-posts-better-than-expected-3rd-quarter-profits.html
[2]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--0FmZQy-jU4/UPWyp1RPPjI/AAAAAAAAG8w/I8wQ8bmI8rc/s1600/Outsourcing.png
[3]http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/01/boeing-787-investigation-batteries/
[4]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324640104578162992446387774.html

If the Americans had not bombed Japan with two nuclear devices, the Red Army would have occupied Japan. General Sukov squashed the Japanese armies in Manchuria and only the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stopped him from going all the way, since the Japanese raised the white flag in the aftermath of the nuclear attacks.

The real scenarios to be considered is whether logic of event sequence which is triggered by the root or base event of battery fire is able to bring down a aircraft in its flight, given the level of technical understanding and crew's competence.

If the manufacturer and the regulator(s) organisations are unable to fix the technological hazards arising out of aircraft's design, then the decision to ground the aircraft is a correct one. This is true irrespective of the progress attained in electronic aviation systems in the last forty years or so.

The safety risk to passengers cannot be increased for the sake of manufacture's profits. Boeing and FAA's confidence in their own judgements and their risk perceptions do not matter as long as safety assessments present a different picture of the safety risk.